1995–96 Ulster Rugby season
First provincial professional playing season
The 1995–96 season was Ulster Rugby's first season under professionalism. Brian Bloomfield was in his second season as coach. Stephen Blake-Knox was the new chairman of selectors, replacing Dick Milliken; the other selectors were Bloomfield, Dermott Dalton, Philip Rainey and Nigel Carr. 35-year-old Malone RFC centre Bill Harbinson, who first played for Ulster in 1986, was captain, in his final season before retirement from the game. They played six representative matches, defeating Griqualand West, New Zealand Federation U23 and New South Wales, and losing to a Côte Basque Select XV, the Combined Services and Edinburgh District. They finished second behind Leinster in the IRFU Interprovincial Championship. They were one of three Irish provinces entered into the inaugural Heineken Cup, losing both their pool matches against Cardiff and Bègles-Bordeaux.
Lock Jeremy Davidson, hooker Allen Clarke, out-half David Humphreys and wing James Topping made their debuts for Ireland this season.
Background
On 26 August, rugby union was declared open to professionalism. At this stage the Irish provinces were still representative teams, not professional clubs.
The public source identifies “1995–96 Ulster Rugby season” as first provincial professional playing season. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ulster, Rugby and season.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q111169579. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1995 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “1995–96 Ulster Rugby season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.